Detection of rectangular pulses using median based prefiltering

A filtering scheme for detection of rectangular pulses in noisy conditions is proposed. A median-based prefilter is utilized prior to an optimal matched filter. The median-based prefilter improves the signal-to-noise ratio and helps to attenuate short interference impulses by removing before matched filtering those signal components that do not belong to rectangular pulses. The performance of the proposed prefiltering is analyzed using computer simulations, and the results indicate an improvement that can be significant in certain cases